Who's Holocaust?

Today marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day. What's memorialised here is what we have become used to calling 'The Holocaust', by which is meant the deliberate extermination of some six million European Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. But this very particular term (with its emphatic 'The' prefix and capital H) has only really been around since the 1970s and '80s, which was when it first entered public discourse, having been until then largely the preserve of academic studies, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. The truth is, of course, there have been many holocausts in history even in the strict sense of genocidal attacks purposefully perpetrated against whole peoples. In the modern era, the most notable previous to WW2's was the Armenian genocide carried out from 1915 onwards by the Turks during the First World War. As the Ottoman Empire collapsed under the strain of the conflict, the Christian Armenian minority in Anatolia came to be seen as a threat by nationalist Turkish elites, which began a campaign to deport and exterminate them and destroy their culture (the latter action, by the way, is a key component of the legal definition of genocide as established by the 1948 Convention). It's estimated that up to a million Armenians, some say as many as 1.5 million, died during this episode, which has always been denied by Turkey but is largely recognised as genocide by most serious historians and, officially so, by some 34 countries worldwide. In the more recent past, there has been the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which the majority population of Hutus launched a campaign of murderous violence against the Tutsi minority (killing more than 650,000 in just over four months and raping tens of thousands of women). This African holocaust recalls another, in the early years of the 20th century, committed by the German military in south-west Africa (modern-day Namibia) against the Herero people, of whom up to 65,000 were systematically murdered or starved. Today, in an extraordinary completion of the circle, we are confronted with another wholesale massacre of a people in the shape of the Gaza tragedy, perpetrated by the very nation no less that was first populated by many Jewish survivors of The Holocaust after the state's founding in 1948. Despite angry Israeli denials, the killing by shooting and bombing of tens of thousands of Gazan Palestinians (a third of them children) and the deliberate destruction of their cities and their way of life has now been condemned by all reputable historians of The Holocaust as an act of genocide. When does genocide amount to the 'lesser' crime of ethnic cleansing? Which was it in Bosnia during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s? What do we call what's happening to the Muslim Uyghurs in north-west China today? If Putin had overrun Ukraine after his invasion of 2022, can anyone really doubt that the Russians would have made every effort to erase the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture? These are not questions we can resolve here. Suffice it to say, as the world becomes ever more unstable, with might asserting right, the potential for holocausts and genocides will rise. In that context, the enormity of The Holocaust, the sheer scale of its crime, will rightly continue to be held up as a warning from history to the future.

Turkish soldiers with bayonets fixed escort Armenian men from the town of Kharpert (or Harput) to their execution. The photo is undated, but mass arrests and deportations of Armenians in the area began from the spring of 1915, with widespread massacres committed thereafter. (Armenian National Institute)

If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again.

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